Mauler Twins

Every incarnation of the Maulers looks exactly alike, a byproduct of the cloning that keeps them alive, so no feature separates one from the other. They stand far taller than ordinary people, with blue skin stretched over enormous, heavily built frames, broad shoulders, shaved heads, and blocky facial features. A sleeveless black leotard bearing a large white 'M' that runs from chest to legs is their signature garb, worn with bare feet and matched by dark nails on both hands and toes. During lab work they often add long white coats and protective goggles.

The lone survivor who later styled himself King Mauler carried the scars of Angstrom Levy's exploded encoder across the right half of his body. That side turned a mottled grey streaked with swollen purple veins, the flesh drooping to bare bone at the jaw and teeth, with the right eye gone entirely. By the time of his next appearance both Maulers were whole again and showed no trace of the damage.

The pair project arrogance and cold indifference, quick to boast until real danger forces them to reckon with their limits. Because one mind is copied straight into the other, their teamwork borders on flawless, and they routinely trade off finishing each other's thoughts even while insulting one another as idiots and jackasses. Cruelty comes easily to them, yet malice is not the true engine of their work. What drives the twins is an appetite for knowledge and a wish to be left alone, which makes them willing to serve anyone offering enough money or a fresh scientific outlet. For all their intellect, their pride and tunnel vision lead them into blunders they fail to foresee.

They are not, however, wholly without feeling. The twins showed real sorrow watching Rudy meet his own clone, and they took care to warn the original Rudy that a memory transfer would not carry his consciousness forward but instead wake a separate being. After the disastrous experiment that maimed both a Mauler and Angstrom Levy, the survivor still urged his enemy toward a hospital despite having been enraged moments before. His dealings with Robot and Levy soured him on ever taking orders again, prompting him to set himself above his clone using his scars. That break with the twins' usual equality bred a Mauler treated as lesser, and the slighted clone eventually killed the original to restore the balance between them.

The Maulers wield staggering physical strength, hoisting industrial slabs of metal larger than themselves without tiring and handling mounted cannons and machine guns with ease. Their bulk slows them, yet their powerful legs let them clear great distances in a single bound, as their prison break demonstrated. Their hides shrug off gunfire and blasts, which they liken to a faint tingle, though a strike to a soft target such as the eye can still wound them, and heavyweights like Omni-Man, the Immortal, or War Woman can draw blood. A rapid healing factor mends bullet wounds far quicker than any human could manage, but it cannot regrow lost limbs, leaving them vulnerable to advanced weaponry like a multi-phase fusion generator turret. A blast strong enough, such as the encoder explosion, can reduce them to ash and blackened bone unless they are sufficiently shielded.

Their true edge is genius-level intellect spanning many scientific fields, letting them build sophisticated machinery from crude or improvised parts. Their cloning technique triggers rapid division of an isolated blood cell, injected with a serum and jolted with electricity, then grown in a vat into a full-body copy within days while the living Mauler feeds it. A companion invention copies an entire mind and loads it into a fresh clone, which wakes convinced it is the original, though the device strains and can overheat on unusual brains like Rudy Connors's, making each unit essentially single use. They are also gifted surgeons and diagnosticians, reattaching the Immortal's severed head with a laser and staples and planting devices inside cloned bodies without visible marks, and their engineering skill lets them convert an abandoned warehouse into a working laboratory or retool Angstrom's dimensional apparatus on the fly.